LEGIT REVIEWS HAS THE FINAL numbers on the HD4850 posted, comparing it to its arch-nemesis, the 9800GTX+. It’s the “new-new” mainstream, you see? You’re likely to be baffled by the current offering of GPUs – you’ve literally got all the choices in the world at all prices. The 9800GTX+ shrink performs very well – and like we mentioned earlier, does allow for some decent overclocking headroom. The HD 4850 is left in its trail, but… there's an answer for that in the works. It’s the real thing. Read on.

PC Perspiration is also testing a sample of the shrunken G92, which is showing a slight lead over the HD4850. Ryan’s preliminary conclusions also show that the shrunken G92 is actually sucking more power than the 65nm version, when you’d expect the exact opposite – the 9800GTX+ is, however, matched in price to the HD4850. Rush over here.

TweakTown is exploring the nuances of Crossfire between Intel’s P45 and X48 chipsets. So far we’ve heard that the P45 is an X48 in poorer clothes. Crossfire, however, is very different. On a P45 the PCIe lanes scale back to 8x mode for dual Crossfire, while the X48 maintains 16x on both… ah, but does it make a difference, you ask? Why … Yes! At least in Crysis and World in Conflict. Other gains are marginal compared to these two titles. Get into the juicy details, here.

George at Hillbilly Hardware is trying out a passive cooler on his 8800GT (although it’s compatible with the HD3870). The Artic Cooling Acceleros S1 is a big finned heatsink that sits on your GPU and sucks away the heat. It also comes with some extra RAM sinks to help stability. Installation is tricky, but according to the graph, well worth it. $30 is a small price to pay for the premium of silence, if you ask us. Catch George here.

Circuit Remix – a site we only recently added to our mega list of “daily roundup” sites – is testing the Aeneon XTune 2x1GB DDR3-1333 CL8 kit. Aeneon is the offspring of Qimonda – the memory manufacturer, so it should stand to reason that these are outfitted with Qimonda modules. Performance is under the top performing kits out there, but still, the XTune is much cheaper – almost half as much as top rated kit. At $150 it seems to have good value by itself, even though there was no groundbreaking performance. Read it here.

It’s 30 degrees Celsius here, right now, and we know how things can get toasty when CPUs are under stress. The Hardware Canucks give the Xigmatek HDT-S1283 CPU cooler a whirl, even though there is no (current) heat wave in Canada. They’ve tested the cooler with an E4600 budget CPU and a Q6600 quad core, both overclocked. Nothing short of amazing, says HC. Catch the cooling glory here. µ